Henry by David Starkey Read Free Book Online Page B

waiting to be struck, and Foxe, with good reason, fancied himself as a human blacksmith. (‘Here in England’, Henry told the Spanish ambassador, ‘they think [Winchester] is a fox. And such is his name.’) So, ‘although he did not know [Wolsey] particularly well’, Foxe sang his praises to Henry. Then he primed Wolsey’s ambition. That was easily done. Finally, it remained to find a suitable opening. This time death, which had so often hindered Wolsey’s career by removing his patrons, struck in his favour. Thomas Hobbes, who had been appointed royal almoner at the beginning of Henry’s reign, died in September 1509 and Foxe ‘took care’ that Wolsey should be his successor. 8
    The almoner was in charge of the charitable doles of the royal household; his office involved personal attendance on the king and he was also a regular, if junior, member of the royal council.
    It was a start.
    * * *
    Wolsey’s first known appearance as a councillor came about 20 November 1509 when he countersigned, as the most junior member of the board, a warrant for the issuing of a proclamation. Here, too, Foxe talked his protégé up, making sure that ‘he should be received with approval and should be consulted in the council with the chief men’. He also ‘made much of him publicly as well as privately by mentioning the man’s discretion, vigilance and his excellent hard work’. ‘Mr Wolsey Elimosinarius (Almoner)’ duly appears at the unusually weighty meeting of the council on 21 June 1510 to consider the duke of Buckingham’s claim to be hereditary constable of England. 9
    Not for the last time, the butcher’s son sat in judgment on England’s premier peer.
    The council was not the ultimate source of authority, however; the king was. Henry’s powers might be veiled because of his age, but time would soon correct that. Wolsey grasped these truths with his usual incisiveness and it was to the king – and the king’s young friends – that he bent his remarkable powers of charm and persuasion.
    ‘Wolsey’, Vergil continues, ‘now began to stick closely to the king’s side, and it is wonderful to relate in how short a time he came to be accepted both by him and by his retinue of young men, which he kept as his favourites.’ For Wolsey’s priestly vows sat lightly upon him. He had probably begun his relationship with Mistress Lark in the last months of Henry VII’s reign and she would bear him at least two children. Now, according to Vergil, ‘since there was no reason for the appearance of seriousness’, ‘his priestly persona was discarded’ almost entirely. Instead, ‘together with the young men, he very often played the lute, danced, held many charming conversations, laughed, joked and generally amused himself’. 10
    Here it is worth remembering one rather overlooked episode in Wolsey’s early career. He had been a schoolmaster, if only for two terms, and tutor to the aristocratic boys of the Dorset household. And teachers, if they are any good (and Wolsey tended to be very good at anything he turned his hand to), have to understand the young.
    It seems clear that Wolsey did.
    He applied this knowledge above all to Henry himself. And there was more to it than ‘playfulness’. ‘Because he could act more conveniently out of sight of witnesses’, Vergil claims, ‘he made a temple of all the pleasures at his house’, where the king was a frequent visitor.
    And there, amid sensual delights, Wolsey inculcated a series of maxims into his royal pupil. ‘That the state was being badly run by many governors, each of whom was serving his own ends’. ‘That the management of the kingdom’s government was safer with one man rather than many’. That Henry ‘would be better suited, in the flower of his youth, to turning his mind to literature and the occasional honest pleasure, rather than being weighed down with the anxieties [of business]’. ‘That it was right for thegovernment of the kingdom to be